You had a cell? Back in my day all matter and energy in the universe was compressed into a point smaller than those tiny transistors you punk kids use as a sorry excuse for a switch!
This very much reminds of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, and T Zero both of which star qwfwq in adventures involving time before time, space before space, and other fanciful stories regarding physics and the nature of the universe. Sort of like Flatland but even better. Here's a site that talks about parallels between Calvino and Borges.
I wouldn't pray when I needed to calcuate the volume under a curve.
I know it's considered lame to reply to one's own comment, but I just wanted to say that I do understand that one calculates a volume bounded by a curve and rotated about an axis. I think my pomo mojo got in the way of my calculus for second there . ..
I like to battle with post-modernists for the same reason it's fun to taunt Jehovah's Witnesses -- there's no need for me to get defensive -- the fact that we are communicating through the Internet is proof enough that science and not religion or philosophy is the real thing.
If you're not defensive then you are certainly smug. Comparing postmodern philosophy to religion is pretty reductive. Additionally, I'm curious as to why you so contemptuously dismiss Jehovah's witnesses. So you don't believe. Why "taunt" them? For what it's worth, I don't think postmodern philosophers are trying to convert you to postmodernism if that's what you're afraid of.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy. For example, writing was preserved from the 14th through 16th centuries by monasteries. Does that mean they were "better" than science back then? Also consider that history is littered with ideological problems science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example, but there are others. Eugenics also comes to mind. (Phlogiston theory is a less politically charged example.)
Your problem, Jonathan, seems to be that you see no value in anything but science. At least that's what you seem to be saying. Personally, I see value in science as well as other discourses. They're not mutually exclusive for me. I wouldn't use science when emotion is called for. I wouldn't pray when I needed to calcuate the volume under a curve.
Maybe you're trolling. I certainly hope so, because if you aren't, you are a very narrow-minded person, indeed.
Read carefully before you make accusations in all caps.
Well read. I scanned the article and now wish in this 21st century the editors WOULD ALLOW US TO EDIT OUR COMMENTS . . . wait, don't tell me. This feature already exists . ..
it's pretty clear that postmodernist attacks on science are just penis envy from a pseudofield which has no purpose except to give people jobs.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science. You need not be because a deeper understanding of what most postmodernist philosophy has to say about science cannot be characterized as "attacks on science." In particular, the postmodernist assertion that all human systems of knowledge, science included, are affected by dogma and cultural bias is simply a fact. However, science has a system of evaluation that endeavors to correct for those effects that involves non-humans to an extraordinary degree. Bruno Latour, for example, discusses this in both Science In Action and We Have Never Been Modern.
Non-scientific systems of human thought also have mechanisms of correction. Law, philosophy, psychology, art theory--all of these have means of offsetting the bias inherent in human systems. This is not news. Even what you charge to be a "pseudofield" has a means of achieving consensus.
Postmodernism has many facets in the different branches of human endeavor. It is different in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music (the humanities). It is generally misunderstood as saying that nothing has any meaning, perhaps deservedly so. But postmodern philosophy in its best forms recognizes distinctions between fields and reveals that all fields are prone to error.
I agree, also, that there are criticisms of scientific studies that "have nothing to do with privilege or dogma," critiques which require "literacy" (what I also would call expert knowledge) to deal with. So your argument with me is what?
There is some real beauty in some of the postmodern philosophers. People like Derrida, Foucault, Irigary, Barthes, and Baudrillard have startling, provocative things to say about the world we live in. They often don't understand science very well, and I definitely would not turn to them to understand the value of a scientific report qua science. That doesn't mean their writing is without value.
If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.
Sokal's hoodwinking of the editors and readers of Social Text is more complicated than the real split between what C. P. Snow termed "The Two Cultures" of humanites and science. The issue is in fact complicated enough that it does not compress into anything nearly attractive as the sensational claim that postmodern intellectuals don't know their anuses from a hole in the ground. Still, I'm going to try to point out ways that the popular reading of the Sokal affair ignores some important features of the events which led to the publication of Sokal's article as well as some important questions regarding the final signficance of the debate.
To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins respond to Sokal's hoax in a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca (news of Sokal's hoax was published in May/June 1996 and Ross and Robbins' response in July/August 1996). That response does not seem to be available on the web, but from what I remember it details the dodgy back-and-forth of Sokal and Social Text's editors about publishing the article. Sokal refused to conduct any of the revisions and so the editors of Social Text--perhaps a touch too eager to have a scientist speak on matters normally of interest only to postmodern humanities scholars--published the article without revisions. As Jack Slater would say: "Big mistake."
In other words, the editors of Social Text smelled that the fish was bad, but ate it anyway. It wasn't so much that the article was considered a good one as much as the editors wanted the prestige of publishing a credentialed scientist's views regarding postmodernism, even if those views were a bit cranky.
The issue becomes much more complicated than Sokal's cheer of "egg on your face" circulated by the popular media (especially the web). For one, the editors of Social Text to this day maintain that Sokal's article does in fact have some good points, especially to the extent that it raises problems of authority and validity regarding how disciplines like science produce what is taken as knowledge and fact.
Some of Robbins' articles regarding the aftermath are available on the web, such as his "On Being Hoaxed" and a later article entitled "Anatomy of a Hoax. Both were originally published in separate issues of Tikkun"
The real points of this Sokal affair, in my opinion, are 1) a bad editorial decision was made by editors of a humanities journal, 2) Sokal's unethical trick is now enshrined and will probably be his greatest claim to fame as a "physicist," and 3) the primary tenets of postmodernism remain unchanged because it is too easy to see how culture and dogma shape what people perceive as truth, something that is true not only in religion, philosophy, and cultural studies, but also to some extent in the sciences.
A final real question which tends to get ignored is what would have happened if Sokal had waited a year or two before revealing his hoax. Would a humanities academic have given the lie to the nonsense? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but given the tendency to cull a quick headline from a very complicated series of events, such a question and many others simply get ignored.
ind my grammar more than sufficient, yet I still make mistakes occasionally.
This is not meant to embarrass you, but to point out that the grandparent is right, even regarding your not-too-grammatically-complex post. To wit, let's take the following sentences from your post.
Sentence 1:
There are some I ignore outright, since I've been over them before and don't agree with the checker's assessment.
This is a grammatical error. Subordinate clauses (ones that being with subordinating conjunctions like "since," "because," and "although" do not take commas when following an independent clause. While this may seem picky (it is), it is also the equivalent of geekspeak regarding the English langauge.
Sentence 2:
But it does catch some mistakes, and teaches me something new in the process.
You have a comma between a compound verb: "catch some mistakes AND teaches me something." That's just plain wrong.
My point is not to make you look like a jackass. Your post is well-formed and perfectly intelligible even to someone with a professional knowledge of grammar. However, like most who believe that a grammar checker gives one the opportunity to catch potential problems, your knowledge of English grammar is not advanced enough to help you distinguish right from wrong. Grammar checkers, even when they make writers pay more attention to their writing, provide most people with a false sense of security.
For my part, if I were to see such errors in a document, say like an application for graduate admission into an English program, I wouldn't even blink. I don't think it's that big of a deal. But I definitely wouldn't want someone who makes such errors to think that a grammar checker actually helps to improve his or her written expression.
Just to be clear on the matter, I'm not some prig who thinks I write perfect English or that "perfect" English is the be all end all. For one, English grammar was *invented* in the 18th century and the person responsible for that first grammar was in fact working on incorrect assumptions (mainly that English is a Germanic language which it is not). I make mistakes all the time, but that's a horse of a different color.
I want to AC this because it is a bit pedantic, but then you might not realize I replied . . . sometimes I look at questions of language and usage in the same way I do questions of coding (though I'm only a part-time PERL and HTML wannabe).
Your explanatin cleared up my confusion (though it was your mistake, initially). Even with the correction, I assumed that the speaker was not an employee of FooCo, but an investor or something, someone who was aware of FooCo and thinking to make money by investing in FooCo. In this, case there is no number disagreement: two sentences, two subjects.
Your point is an interesting one, especially becaause it points to differences in the determination of collective identity and individual identity and how both are affected by the words one chooses. On a deeper level, this kind of discrepancy points to the whole trainwreck of governments not considering individuals who work for corporations liable for the corporation's actions, etc.
but now I'm thinking that I need to get a life. Thanks for the correction.
note that the American English version changes tense half way through
One doesn't need a doctorate in English (though I do have one) to realize you are mistaken. The American English version, as the British English version, is in present tense start to finish. Your claim regrading consistency is incoherent.
Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
What amazes|saddens|stuns|infuriates me is that price-fixing which targets the arguably already-wealthy who can afford high technology purchases is processed relatively quickly while the at best lethal neglect of the managers and owners of Union Carbide will never see a court docket.
Dumb, stupid me. DRAM prices affect larger markets. The deaths of thousands of impoverished coolies affect no one.
passign a law saying that you cant take peoples pictures without their permission. Which in fact we allready have.
Do you mean the US or the UK? In the States there is no law curtailing people's abilities to photograph people in public spaces, notwithstanding NYC's recent attempt to outlaw photography in the subways. From what I understand, there is an unwritten doctrine that the "eye cannot trespass" which protects people's abilities to take pictures of whatever and whomever they want from when occupying public spaces. In other words, I can set up a telephoto lense in the street and take pix of your living room without breaking laws concerning photography.
You are either a liar or an idiot.
on
The Cult of Mac
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· Score: 1
And when the Mac goes down - as it invariably does - I have to TAKE THE BATTERY OUT to get the fucking thing to shut off.
Take the battery out? Command-Ctrl Power will power the machine down no matter what. It's equivalent to the RESET button.
[. ..]the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting.
I'm an old-time Mac OS 6-9 user and switched to X about a year ago. Only recently have I started exploiting just a teensy fraction of the power of OS X.
For example, the ability to write scripts (yes, I write in PERL) and have them execute when I add or remove an item from a directory is something I just didn't get until this last weekend. I have a triple-head monitor set-up and having a web browser open along with a terminal window and my text editor, I sometimes had a hard time finding those pesky desktop icons for the hard drives, which I've always and forever lower-left clicked (my trackball has 5 buttons) to open.
At some point I recalled that one could open a Finder window by using Command-N. But after reading your post, I realized that desktop icons for drives are simply unnecessary. I've been using Apple machines since 1982 and Macintosh OS since 1992, and it took me a year for my behavior to change with regard to exploiting the availability of PERL (or whatever language strikes your fancy) scripting and the way the finder works in OS X.
In other words, my memory of OS 9 inhibits me from grokking OS X. Thanks for the tip.
Please note that you are NOT allowed to distribute this file online
Your post got me thinking. iTunes controls the songs that are on the iPod. From what I understand, if one connects an iPod to a computer with iTunes running, iTunes will delete the songs on the iPod that are not also in its library.
Is this true? (I don't own an iPod.) If so, it might be trivial for Apple to release an update to iTunes (maybe even via the black u2Pods) which will disable this iTunes "feature." But if this happens, does that means iTunes will from that moment on refrain from deleting songs from connected iPods?
I apologize if I am completely mis-thinking how iPods and iTunes interact, in which case here is your money back: ø
Descending to the level of name calling to defend our position, are we?
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't mean to come off so harsh. FWIW, I was talking about the logic, not you as the author.
For me, protecting speech as speech in any medium is very important, while turning speech into a side effect of medium (and thus "freeing" it) is a very bad idea. I'm a HUGE 1st Amendment freak, and when I sense speech being challenged or enabled by means other than itself, I get edgy.
It isn't speech at all.
It's a file that I have on my computer.
When you're done with your sophmoric semantic quibbling, you can try applying the same idiot logic to, say, newsprint. "It's not speech, these are ink marks on a piece of paper." Speech is not an effect of the media used to transmit it, but the intermediation of ideas from one interlocutor to another regardless of medium.
This is late in the game and low on the page, but whatever, you're like the 5th post I've seen that has said this. Do you (and the others) realize that this is exactly what Andreesen intended with Netscape? It's why Microsoft killed them.
Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
This kind of thinking which prioritizes short-term profit is exactly what got Real into trouble before. Without thinking of the benefits of consumer loyalty, Real produced software that disregarded users' settings, which placed parts of itself in disparate places, and that made it difficult for most users to uninstall it. The result of such thinking was a backlash against Real, one strong enough to erode whatever loyalty/preference it once had in the media player market.
Fast-forward to 2004. Apple users are legendary for their brand loyalty. Any company that works in this space understands that pleasing users is the raison d'etre (French for "reason for being") of Mac-based companies.
Real claims to see no benefit in offering the service to Mac users, but for more than a year, iTMS was Mac only, and in that first year the sales of iTMS tracks eclipsed the sales of all the other contenders combined. Even in the face of this historical reality, Real says that its research doesn't lead it to conclude that the Mac market is worth going after. Maybe Real are right. But I strongly suspect that Real's music service is going to be broken sooner than later and when that happens, they will have no one to cry to except for Windows users who can't listen to their Harmony songs on their iPods.
If, on the other hand, Real had a cohort of Mac users that could (read would) complain to Jobs and company about their Harmony-purchased songs being broken . ..
Are you listening, Mr. Glaser? This is the sound that "getting it" makes. Service your potential markets, don't dis them outright.
This is a bit OT, but not if we're talking about overhyped, super "macho," directors. Tarantino is a directorial null device. The only film of his worth a damn is Reservoir Dogs. The writing, the acting, and the grit of the film come together in a way they do not in any of Tarantino's other films. The recent Kill Bill films are a travesty, though mildly interesting from a cinematic perspective (i.e. millions of dollars jettisoned on the whims of an undertalented first-film-was-a-hit director). Tarantino's single virute (and not one to be sneeze at) is that despite being unable to write and direct a proper film, he has perfect cinematic taste.
He understands John Woo like no other American director. He knows that violence can be ultra sexy in a way that only the Wachowski brothers did in The Matrix (forget Reloaded and Revolutions which are interesting for different reasons). Tarantino did something amazing with Reservoir Dogs and has since been unable to equal that effort. Pulp Fiction is somewhat interesting, ending as it does with an superb and enigmatic subplot. Pure narrative beauty, reminiscent of the Coen Brothers (at their best) and Lynch. (My big question is whatever happened to Atom Egoyan? Soderbergh lost his edge.)
Swerving somewhat back on topic. Smith's work is somewhat a one-trick pony, sure. His stuff feels the same, but he is much more skilled a story-teller than Tarantino has proven himself to be.
Why does that prevent the display of codes, HTML style? HTML is also nothing more than containers in containers.
If you had taken 20 seconds to scan the linked-to-article's first 2 paragraphs, you would have discovered that these nested containers contain pointers to formatting definitions contained at the beginning and end of the Word file. The situation described seems to resemble selectively applied style sheets, but even this is only a crude approximation of what is probably going on. Ultimately, HTML and Word files do their formatting work in entirely different ways and for you to compare the two on the basis of "nested containers" is like thinking peanut butter and butter must both be dairy products.
The nearest to an "official" link I could find on this is a WIRED editorial
The logic reminds me of the fantasy graduate students sometimes throw around. Grading is tough work and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) get maybe $650/semester to grade papers for a course directed by a professor. When GTAs teach their own courses, the pay jumps to about $2,000. These GTAs often joke about hiring their less-employed peers as graders.
It's Persistence of Vision. It was named in homage to my favorite Salvador Dali painting, "The Persistence of Memory", the one with the melting clocks.
I understand about authorial (developorial?) intentionality and all that. I think the allusion is great. It also has an unintentional affinity. Persistence of vision is the the name of the effect that blends the separate frames of a motion picture together. Persistence of vision enables/tricks our brains into seeing projected films as continuous motion.
I support peoples' right to peaceful assembly, but most of the time I see lots of youthful exhuberence and ill-educated idiots who are out to protest because "it's cool", not because they truly believe in a cause or feel that this is their only way to make people aware of the cause.
Yours is one of the most thoughtful and balanced politcal posts I've seen on Slashdot in quite some time. Everything you wrote makes quite a bit of sense, especially your ideas about the ineffectiveness of disruptive protests.
But what you wrote about young uneducated protesters doing what they do to be "cool," reminded me that United States has seen such things before. In the 1950s, the Right made an unprecedented appearance in the form of McCarthyism. That unfortunate political milestone in the United States produced a generation of children who had seen enough of mom-and-pop soda shops and buttoned-down "family values," giving birth to 1960s Counterculture. This reaction rebelled against heteronormative, bourgeois American culture, a culture that could think of nothing better than Mom, Dad, two kids, 1.5 cars and Fido. Sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll was the partial mantra of this counterculture, and the uneducated youth were its champions. Protests of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the drug-obsessed hedonism of the hippies, the promiscuity of the Free Love movement, and the militant aspects of the Civil Rights movement were driven by masses of young people who were tuning in and dropping out. Who, in other words, were too cool for the Establishment
The difference between "protesting because it's cool" and "igniting a revolution" is a difference of degree, not kind. While it is true these early 2000s hactivists and potentially violent RNC protestors don't seem to have much going on, who knows what group of young people will be the "hippies" of their generation?
Slashdot Mirror
You had a cell? Back in my day all matter and energy in the universe was compressed into a point smaller than those tiny transistors you punk kids use as a sorry excuse for a switch!
This very much reminds of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, and T Zero both of which star qwfwq in adventures involving time before time, space before space, and other fanciful stories regarding physics and the nature of the universe. Sort of like Flatland but even better. Here's a site that talks about parallels between Calvino and Borges.
I wouldn't pray when I needed to calcuate the volume under a curve.
I know it's considered lame to reply to one's own comment, but I just wanted to say that I do understand that one calculates a volume bounded by a curve and rotated about an axis. I think my pomo mojo got in the way of my calculus for second there . . .
I like to battle with post-modernists for the same reason it's fun to taunt Jehovah's Witnesses -- there's no need for me to get defensive -- the fact that we are communicating through the Internet is proof enough that science and not religion or philosophy is the real thing.
If you're not defensive then you are certainly smug. Comparing postmodern philosophy to religion is pretty reductive. Additionally, I'm curious as to why you so contemptuously dismiss Jehovah's witnesses. So you don't believe. Why "taunt" them? For what it's worth, I don't think postmodern philosophers are trying to convert you to postmodernism if that's what you're afraid of.
I'm also curoius what using the Internet has to do with the value of religion or philosophy. For example, writing was preserved from the 14th through 16th centuries by monasteries. Does that mean they were "better" than science back then? Also consider that history is littered with ideological problems science has had. Phrenology is one obvious example, but there are others. Eugenics also comes to mind. (Phlogiston theory is a less politically charged example.)
Your problem, Jonathan, seems to be that you see no value in anything but science. At least that's what you seem to be saying. Personally, I see value in science as well as other discourses. They're not mutually exclusive for me. I wouldn't use science when emotion is called for. I wouldn't pray when I needed to calcuate the volume under a curve.
Maybe you're trolling. I certainly hope so, because if you aren't, you are a very narrow-minded person, indeed.
Read carefully before you make accusations in all caps.
Well read. I scanned the article and now wish in this 21st century the editors WOULD ALLOW US TO EDIT OUR COMMENTS . . . wait, don't tell me. This feature already exists . . .
it's pretty clear that postmodernist attacks on science are just penis envy from a pseudofield which has no purpose except to give people jobs.
You are clearly defensive about what postmodernism has to say regarding science. You need not be because a deeper understanding of what most postmodernist philosophy has to say about science cannot be characterized as "attacks on science." In particular, the postmodernist assertion that all human systems of knowledge, science included, are affected by dogma and cultural bias is simply a fact. However, science has a system of evaluation that endeavors to correct for those effects that involves non-humans to an extraordinary degree. Bruno Latour, for example, discusses this in both Science In Action and We Have Never Been Modern.
Non-scientific systems of human thought also have mechanisms of correction. Law, philosophy, psychology, art theory--all of these have means of offsetting the bias inherent in human systems. This is not news. Even what you charge to be a "pseudofield" has a means of achieving consensus.
Postmodernism has many facets in the different branches of human endeavor. It is different in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and music (the humanities). It is generally misunderstood as saying that nothing has any meaning, perhaps deservedly so. But postmodern philosophy in its best forms recognizes distinctions between fields and reveals that all fields are prone to error.
I agree, also, that there are criticisms of scientific studies that "have nothing to do with privilege or dogma," critiques which require "literacy" (what I also would call expert knowledge) to deal with. So your argument with me is what?
There is some real beauty in some of the postmodern philosophers. People like Derrida, Foucault, Irigary, Barthes, and Baudrillard have startling, provocative things to say about the world we live in. They often don't understand science very well, and I definitely would not turn to them to understand the value of a scientific report qua science. That doesn't mean their writing is without value.
If for no other reason, this hoax is important because it points to the deep cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities.
Sokal's hoodwinking of the editors and readers of Social Text is more complicated than the real split between what C. P. Snow termed "The Two Cultures" of humanites and science. The issue is in fact complicated enough that it does not compress into anything nearly attractive as the sensational claim that postmodern intellectuals don't know their anuses from a hole in the ground. Still, I'm going to try to point out ways that the popular reading of the Sokal affair ignores some important features of the events which led to the publication of Sokal's article as well as some important questions regarding the final signficance of the debate.
To start, one of the features regarding Sokal's hoax and also GLARINGLY ABSENT from the wikipedia entry is the initial efforts by Social Text's editorial board to have Sokal revise his article. Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins respond to Sokal's hoax in a subsequent issue of Lingua Franca (news of Sokal's hoax was published in May/June 1996 and Ross and Robbins' response in July/August 1996). That response does not seem to be available on the web, but from what I remember it details the dodgy back-and-forth of Sokal and Social Text's editors about publishing the article. Sokal refused to conduct any of the revisions and so the editors of Social Text--perhaps a touch too eager to have a scientist speak on matters normally of interest only to postmodern humanities scholars--published the article without revisions. As Jack Slater would say: "Big mistake."
In other words, the editors of Social Text smelled that the fish was bad, but ate it anyway. It wasn't so much that the article was considered a good one as much as the editors wanted the prestige of publishing a credentialed scientist's views regarding postmodernism, even if those views were a bit cranky.
The issue becomes much more complicated than Sokal's cheer of "egg on your face" circulated by the popular media (especially the web). For one, the editors of Social Text to this day maintain that Sokal's article does in fact have some good points, especially to the extent that it raises problems of authority and validity regarding how disciplines like science produce what is taken as knowledge and fact.
Some of Robbins' articles regarding the aftermath are available on the web, such as his "On Being Hoaxed" and a later article entitled "Anatomy of a Hoax. Both were originally published in separate issues of Tikkun"
The real points of this Sokal affair, in my opinion, are 1) a bad editorial decision was made by editors of a humanities journal, 2) Sokal's unethical trick is now enshrined and will probably be his greatest claim to fame as a "physicist," and 3) the primary tenets of postmodernism remain unchanged because it is too easy to see how culture and dogma shape what people perceive as truth, something that is true not only in religion, philosophy, and cultural studies, but also to some extent in the sciences.
A final real question which tends to get ignored is what would have happened if Sokal had waited a year or two before revealing his hoax. Would a humanities academic have given the lie to the nonsense? I'm guessing the answer is yes, but given the tendency to cull a quick headline from a very complicated series of events, such a question and many others simply get ignored.
ind my grammar more than sufficient, yet I still make mistakes occasionally.
This is not meant to embarrass you, but to point out that the grandparent is right, even regarding your not-too-grammatically-complex post. To wit, let's take the following sentences from your post.
Sentence 1:
This is a grammatical error. Subordinate clauses (ones that being with subordinating conjunctions like "since," "because," and "although" do not take commas when following an independent clause. While this may seem picky (it is), it is also the equivalent of geekspeak regarding the English langauge.
Sentence 2:
You have a comma between a compound verb: "catch some mistakes AND teaches me something." That's just plain wrong.
My point is not to make you look like a jackass. Your post is well-formed and perfectly intelligible even to someone with a professional knowledge of grammar. However, like most who believe that a grammar checker gives one the opportunity to catch potential problems, your knowledge of English grammar is not advanced enough to help you distinguish right from wrong. Grammar checkers, even when they make writers pay more attention to their writing, provide most people with a false sense of security.
For my part, if I were to see such errors in a document, say like an application for graduate admission into an English program, I wouldn't even blink. I don't think it's that big of a deal. But I definitely wouldn't want someone who makes such errors to think that a grammar checker actually helps to improve his or her written expression.
Just to be clear on the matter, I'm not some prig who thinks I write perfect English or that "perfect" English is the be all end all. For one, English grammar was *invented* in the 18th century and the person responsible for that first grammar was in fact working on incorrect assumptions (mainly that English is a Germanic language which it is not). I make mistakes all the time, but that's a horse of a different color.
I want to AC this because it is a bit pedantic, but then you might not realize I replied . . . sometimes I look at questions of language and usage in the same way I do questions of coding (though I'm only a part-time PERL and HTML wannabe).
Your explanatin cleared up my confusion (though it was your mistake, initially). Even with the correction, I assumed that the speaker was not an employee of FooCo, but an investor or something, someone who was aware of FooCo and thinking to make money by investing in FooCo. In this, case there is no number disagreement: two sentences, two subjects.
Your point is an interesting one, especially becaause it points to differences in the determination of collective identity and individual identity and how both are affected by the words one chooses. On a deeper level, this kind of discrepancy points to the whole trainwreck of governments not considering individuals who work for corporations liable for the corporation's actions, etc.
but now I'm thinking that I need to get a life. Thanks for the correction.
note that the American English version changes tense half way through
One doesn't need a doctorate in English (though I do have one) to realize you are mistaken. The American English version, as the British English version, is in present tense start to finish. Your claim regrading consistency is incoherent.
Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
You mean like these people
What amazes|saddens|stuns|infuriates me is that price-fixing which targets the arguably already-wealthy who can afford high technology purchases is processed relatively quickly while the at best lethal neglect of the managers and owners of Union Carbide will never see a court docket.
Dumb, stupid me. DRAM prices affect larger markets. The deaths of thousands of impoverished coolies affect no one.
passign a law saying that you cant take peoples pictures without their permission. Which in fact we allready have.
Do you mean the US or the UK? In the States there is no law curtailing people's abilities to photograph people in public spaces, notwithstanding NYC's recent attempt to outlaw photography in the subways. From what I understand, there is an unwritten doctrine that the "eye cannot trespass" which protects people's abilities to take pictures of whatever and whomever they want from when occupying public spaces. In other words, I can set up a telephoto lense in the street and take pix of your living room without breaking laws concerning photography.
And when the Mac goes down - as it invariably does - I have to TAKE THE BATTERY OUT to get the fucking thing to shut off.
Take the battery out? Command-Ctrl Power will power the machine down no matter what. It's equivalent to the RESET button.
I just wanted to say that I am HONORED you have picked me as your foe. Now the button next to your name is an appropriate color.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
[. . .]the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting.
I'm an old-time Mac OS 6-9 user and switched to X about a year ago. Only recently have I started exploiting just a teensy fraction of the power of OS X.
For example, the ability to write scripts (yes, I write in PERL) and have them execute when I add or remove an item from a directory is something I just didn't get until this last weekend. I have a triple-head monitor set-up and having a web browser open along with a terminal window and my text editor, I sometimes had a hard time finding those pesky desktop icons for the hard drives, which I've always and forever lower-left clicked (my trackball has 5 buttons) to open.
At some point I recalled that one could open a Finder window by using Command-N. But after reading your post, I realized that desktop icons for drives are simply unnecessary. I've been using Apple machines since 1982 and Macintosh OS since 1992, and it took me a year for my behavior to change with regard to exploiting the availability of PERL (or whatever language strikes your fancy) scripting and the way the finder works in OS X.
In other words, my memory of OS 9 inhibits me from grokking OS X. Thanks for the tip.
Please note that you are NOT allowed to distribute this file online
Your post got me thinking. iTunes controls the songs that are on the iPod. From what I understand, if one connects an iPod to a computer with iTunes running, iTunes will delete the songs on the iPod that are not also in its library.
Is this true? (I don't own an iPod.) If so, it might be trivial for Apple to release an update to iTunes (maybe even via the black u2Pods) which will disable this iTunes "feature." But if this happens, does that means iTunes will from that moment on refrain from deleting songs from connected iPods?
I apologize if I am completely mis-thinking how iPods and iTunes interact, in which case here is your money back: ø
Descending to the level of name calling to defend our position, are we?
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't mean to come off so harsh. FWIW, I was talking about the logic, not you as the author.
For me, protecting speech as speech in any medium is very important, while turning speech into a side effect of medium (and thus "freeing" it) is a very bad idea. I'm a HUGE 1st Amendment freak, and when I sense speech being challenged or enabled by means other than itself, I get edgy.
It isn't speech at all.
It's a file that I have on my computer.
When you're done with your sophmoric semantic quibbling, you can try applying the same idiot logic to, say, newsprint. "It's not speech, these are ink marks on a piece of paper." Speech is not an effect of the media used to transmit it, but the intermediation of ideas from one interlocutor to another regardless of medium.
The best revenge against Steve Ballmer for this anti-MP3 nonsense is for all of us to run out and buy an Apple Macintosh or three.
You can't fool us with that silly UID "rjung2k", Mr. Jobs. C'mon now . . .
Imagine: The Google Desktop Environment.
This is late in the game and low on the page, but whatever, you're like the 5th post I've seen that has said this. Do you (and the others) realize that this is exactly what Andreesen intended with Netscape? It's why Microsoft killed them.
Real entering the Apple market by supporting OSX (or other MacOS) customers is not as immediate a benefit for Real, as making a significant ROI would be like trying to push water uphill.
This kind of thinking which prioritizes short-term profit is exactly what got Real into trouble before. Without thinking of the benefits of consumer loyalty, Real produced software that disregarded users' settings, which placed parts of itself in disparate places, and that made it difficult for most users to uninstall it. The result of such thinking was a backlash against Real, one strong enough to erode whatever loyalty/preference it once had in the media player market.
Fast-forward to 2004. Apple users are legendary for their brand loyalty. Any company that works in this space understands that pleasing users is the raison d'etre (French for "reason for being") of Mac-based companies.
Real claims to see no benefit in offering the service to Mac users, but for more than a year, iTMS was Mac only, and in that first year the sales of iTMS tracks eclipsed the sales of all the other contenders combined. Even in the face of this historical reality, Real says that its research doesn't lead it to conclude that the Mac market is worth going after. Maybe Real are right. But I strongly suspect that Real's music service is going to be broken sooner than later and when that happens, they will have no one to cry to except for Windows users who can't listen to their Harmony songs on their iPods.
If, on the other hand, Real had a cohort of Mac users that could (read would) complain to Jobs and company about their Harmony-purchased songs being broken . . .
Are you listening, Mr. Glaser? This is the sound that "getting it" makes. Service your potential markets, don't dis them outright.
Throw Tarantino on that list too.
This is a bit OT, but not if we're talking about overhyped, super "macho," directors. Tarantino is a directorial null device. The only film of his worth a damn is Reservoir Dogs. The writing, the acting, and the grit of the film come together in a way they do not in any of Tarantino's other films. The recent Kill Bill films are a travesty, though mildly interesting from a cinematic perspective (i.e. millions of dollars jettisoned on the whims of an undertalented first-film-was-a-hit director). Tarantino's single virute (and not one to be sneeze at) is that despite being unable to write and direct a proper film, he has perfect cinematic taste.
He understands John Woo like no other American director. He knows that violence can be ultra sexy in a way that only the Wachowski brothers did in The Matrix (forget Reloaded and Revolutions which are interesting for different reasons). Tarantino did something amazing with Reservoir Dogs and has since been unable to equal that effort. Pulp Fiction is somewhat interesting, ending as it does with an superb and enigmatic subplot. Pure narrative beauty, reminiscent of the Coen Brothers (at their best) and Lynch. (My big question is whatever happened to Atom Egoyan? Soderbergh lost his edge.)
Swerving somewhat back on topic. Smith's work is somewhat a one-trick pony, sure. His stuff feels the same, but he is much more skilled a story-teller than Tarantino has proven himself to be.
Why does that prevent the display of codes, HTML style? HTML is also nothing more than containers in containers.
If you had taken 20 seconds to scan the linked-to-article's first 2 paragraphs, you would have discovered that these nested containers contain pointers to formatting definitions contained at the beginning and end of the Word file. The situation described seems to resemble selectively applied style sheets, but even this is only a crude approximation of what is probably going on. Ultimately, HTML and Word files do their formatting work in entirely different ways and for you to compare the two on the basis of "nested containers" is like thinking peanut butter and butter must both be dairy products.
The nearest to an "official" link I could find on this is a WIRED editorial
The logic reminds me of the fantasy graduate students sometimes throw around. Grading is tough work and graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) get maybe $650/semester to grade papers for a course directed by a professor. When GTAs teach their own courses, the pay jumps to about $2,000. These GTAs often joke about hiring their less-employed peers as graders.
It's Persistence of Vision. It was named in homage to my favorite Salvador Dali painting, "The Persistence of Memory", the one with the melting clocks.
I understand about authorial (developorial?) intentionality and all that. I think the allusion is great. It also has an unintentional affinity. Persistence of vision is the the name of the effect that blends the separate frames of a motion picture together. Persistence of vision enables/tricks our brains into seeing projected films as continuous motion.
I support peoples' right to peaceful assembly, but most of the time I see lots of youthful exhuberence and ill-educated idiots who are out to protest because "it's cool", not because they truly believe in a cause or feel that this is their only way to make people aware of the cause.
Yours is one of the most thoughtful and balanced politcal posts I've seen on Slashdot in quite some time. Everything you wrote makes quite a bit of sense, especially your ideas about the ineffectiveness of disruptive protests.
But what you wrote about young uneducated protesters doing what they do to be "cool," reminded me that United States has seen such things before. In the 1950s, the Right made an unprecedented appearance in the form of McCarthyism. That unfortunate political milestone in the United States produced a generation of children who had seen enough of mom-and-pop soda shops and buttoned-down "family values," giving birth to 1960s Counterculture. This reaction rebelled against heteronormative, bourgeois American culture, a culture that could think of nothing better than Mom, Dad, two kids, 1.5 cars and Fido. Sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll was the partial mantra of this counterculture, and the uneducated youth were its champions. Protests of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the drug-obsessed hedonism of the hippies, the promiscuity of the Free Love movement, and the militant aspects of the Civil Rights movement were driven by masses of young people who were tuning in and dropping out. Who, in other words, were too cool for the Establishment
The difference between "protesting because it's cool" and "igniting a revolution" is a difference of degree, not kind. While it is true these early 2000s hactivists and potentially violent RNC protestors don't seem to have much going on, who knows what group of young people will be the "hippies" of their generation?